ilia viazov // nelud

Nelud — the word resists clean translation. In Russian it functions as a substantive: an unhuman, a non-person. It can name a cruel and merciless individual, someone placed outside the moral community of people. It can also name the undead — a form of life that resembles the human but is not. What ties these meanings together is the negation at the root: something that should be human, and isn’t. What the word does not distinguish is who stands on which side of that negation. The one who considers certain people subhuman and treats them as lesser is a Nelud. The emigrant who is considered subhuman is also a Nelud. The language offers no separation between the one who excludes and the one who is excluded — both are named by the same otherness, from opposite directions. This collapse is not accidental. It is where the piece begins. It also begins in something more immediate: the daily experience of being treated as a lesser presence. Not always through open hostility — more often through the quiet, accumulated weight of being the wrong kind of person in the wrong place. A Russian in Germany during a war that Russia started — suspected by default, tolerated at best. The experience is rarely dramatic; it accumulates in small adjustments, in the texture of ordinary interactions. It is, in different forms, what almost any unwanted emigrant knows. The performance is played on Cyberware — an instrument worn as a vest, consisting of ten guitar pedals and a matrix mixer that routes their signals into one another, generating feedback loops that the body carries and modulates. The instrument is not held or operated; it is worn, inhabited, fused with the body that moves inside it. In Donna Haraway’s cybernetic manifesto, the cyborg is a figure that refuses the clean boundary between organism and machine, between self and network. In Russian etymology, the cyborg is a Nelud — a form of life that has moved beyond the human without ceasing to carry it. The cybernetic body extends further into the room through spatialisation. SuperCollider performs continuous real-time feature analysis of the audio signal from the vest — tracking novelty, and separating harmonic and percussive components through HPSS. These features drive the spatial distribution of sound across a higher-order ambisonic field, encoded and decoded through the Ambisonic Toolkit. The harmonic and percussive layers are treated as distinct spatial presences, moving independently through the room according to the qualities of the signal itself. The compositional decisions are embedded in the system — in the way the analysis is designed to respond, in the thresholds that trigger movement, in the logic that determines how the room breathes with the body inside it. This is the position the piece inhabits and accepts. The feedback loops running through the vest are the same loops running through any body entangled with technology — the difference is that here they are made audible, worn on the surface, performed. The dissolution is painful. But it points somewhere: toward a way of existing no longer organized around the pure body, the national subject, the border between the person and the non-person.